This is a rhetorical trick which is becoming increasingly common, and frankly it’s getting on my tits.

Because this isn’t about criticising your political opponents for things they’ve actually done or actually said; it’s imagining a scenario in which they do something hypocritical, and then criticising them for the hypocrisy that you’ve just imagined.

Toby Young has just been appointed to the board of the Office for Students – a new regulator with a remit “to champion the interests of students, promote choice and help to ensure that students are receiving a good deal for their investment in higher education”

This is the same Toby Young who championed the flagship Tory ‘free schools’ programme, which literally funnelled money from state schools into increasingly exclusive education.

But let’s put that aside, and see whether he’s a worthwhile advocate for “the interests of students”… in his own words.

So – way back in March, having moved hosts, I decided to update the site.

This was something that should only have taken me a month at most, as it’s not exactly a complicated procedure.

As you can tell from it being mid-December, things didn’t work out quite that well. The basic redesign was relatively straightforward (as anything Wordpress-related is), but transferring my database from my previous host failed, and that – plus some work commitments and various other Real Life™ issues – slowed everything down to a crawl.

In July this year, the Left of UK Politics was rightly impressed with Mhairi Black’s maiden speech to the House of Commons.
One part of that which particularly resonated on social media was her reference to Tony Benn’s “weathercocks and signposts”